THE MEMORY OF LOVE

LINDA OLSSON

Marion Flint, a retired doctor, has lived on a remote stretch of wild New Zealand beach, a landscape conducive both to her solitary lifestyle and her deep denial of a traumatically painful past. Marion faces her memories after a chance encounter with a boy opens her heart to love once again. As she spends more time with Mika, an a child on the autistic spectrum, who visits most Thursdays, she remembers more of her heinous past. One Thursday she finds him floating in the ocean, after saving his life, she finds his frail body covered in horrific bruises. Marion talks to his grandmother who at first does not want to let the boy go because then she would loose the child support money. When Marion agrees to take the boy but let Grandma keep the support money, then the grandma agrees to relinquish the boy. When the boy is actually living with Marion more memories cascade into her being.

Olsson is a tremendous writer. She says so much in so few words. You will love this book.

MADDADDAM

MAGARET ATWOOD

Maddaddam is a story of myth making as Toby explains the past to the Crakers the bio-engenireered creatures created by Crake before he killed everything else in the first book of the trilogy Oryx and Crake. Thanks you to Atwood for providing a synopsis of the first two volumes. I found it a great way to start Maddaddam with a refresher course. Toby tells the story of Zeb and his harsh upbringing by the Rev of the Church of PetrOleum and his eventual escape into a life on the run, first to San Francisco’s “pleeblands,” then to a job as a magician’s assistant, to survival in the Canadian wilderness after a “Bearlift” mission goes wrong, to New New York (on the Jersey Shore) and at last into work at a HelthWyzer laboratory compound, where he meets characters familiar to us as members of an underground movement. Toby’s telling of Zeb’s story is interspersed with the present-day defense of the compound and the unusual partnership they develop for mutual protection. Toby teaches the Crakers to read, write and to tell their own stories.

Maddaddam is a book of hope and healing and renewal.

Read this book but do read the trilogy in order. It is terrific.

 

THE HUMANS

MATT HAIG

Professor Andrew Martin of Cambridge University, one of the great mathematical geniuses of our time, has just discovered the secret of prime numbers, thereby finding the key that will unlock the mysteries of the universe, guarantee a giant technological leap for mankind and put an end to illness and death. Alerted to this amazing breakthrough on the other side of the universe, and convinced that the secret of primes cannot be entrusted to such a violent and backward species as humans, the super-advanced Vonnadorians dispatch an emissary to erase Martin and all traces of his discovery. The book that opens with our alien narrator finding himself in the body of the professor, whom he has just assassinated. But the instantaneous intergalactic travel hasn’t turned out quite as expected. Instead of finding himself in Martin’s office, our nameless Vonnadorian has arrived in the middle of a major highway , with no understanding of human culture and wearing his victim’s body but not a stitch of clothing. He is run over but rapidly heals himself and stumbles off to a gas station where he peruses a Cosmopolitan magazine to learn the local language.

The beginning is laugh out loud funny as the alien learns about post-millenial earth culture and comments on it as a visitor from a far. But as he becomes more human the novel changes tone to warm, welcoming glow.

This is a must read.